Homo Faber and the existential vacuum
Identity was the recurrent theme in the litterary work of Max Frish, who, incidentally, was an architect by training. In his book Homo Faber (1961) Frisch portrays a Unesco expert, an engineer - the symbol of Modern Man - who continously travels around the world on his missions. He is an rational and realistic man whose life seems to be under perfect rational control. However, gradually he looses contact with locality and home, and finally with his own identity. He ends up falling in love whith his own daughter whom he does not recognize as the tragic conseqence of his loss of home and roots. Their incident love ends violently in the daughters death. Homo Fabers grave mistake was his conviction that man can exist without a domicile and that technology can transform the world so that it need not any longer be experienced through emotions. many of us in the consumer world today are suffering from Homo Faber´s alineation. We have become homeless in our culture of abundance.

The architect and the concept of home
We architects are concerned with designing dwellings as architectural manifestations of space,structure and order, but we seem unable to touch upon the more subtle, emotional and diffuse aspects of home. In schools of architecture we are taught to design houses and dwellings, not homes. Yet it is the capcity of the dwelling to provide domicile in the world that matters to the individual dweller. The dwellings have its psyche and soul in addition to its formal and quantifiable qualities. The titels of architectural books invariably use the notion of house - The Modern House,GA-Houses, California Houses, etc. - whereas books and magazines that deal with interior decoration and celebrities are engaged with the notion of home - Celebrity Homes, Artist Homes etc. Needless to say that the publications of the latter type are considered sentimental entertainment and kitsch by the professional architect. Our concept of architecture is based on the idea of the perfectly articulated architectural object. The famous court case between Mies van der Rohe and his client, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, concerning the Farnsworth House, is an example of the contradiction between architecture and home. As we all know Mies had designed one of the most important and aestetically appealing houses of our century, but his client did not find it satisfactory as a home. The court, incidentally, decided in Mies´s favour. Im am not underrating Mies´s architecture, I am simply pointing out the distancing from life and deliberate reduction of the spectrum of life that this architectural work displays. When we compare designs of early Modernity at large and of today´s avant-garde, we can immediately observ a loss of empaty for the dweller. Instead of being motivated by the architect´s so cial vision or an empathetic view of life, architecture has become self-referential and autistic. many of us architects seem to have developed a split personality; as designers and as dwellers we apply different sets of values to the enviroment. in our role as architects we aspire for a meticously articulated and temporally one-dimensional enviroment, whereas as dwellers ourselfs, we prefer a more layered, ambiguous, and aestetically less coherent enviroment; the instinctual dweller seems to emerge through the role values of the professional

Architecture vs. home
The question arises; can a home be an architectural expression? Home is not, perhaps, at all a notion of architecture, but of psycology, psycoanalysis, and sociology. Home is an individual dwelling, and the means of this subtle personalization seem to be outside of our concept of architecture. Dwelling, or the house, is the container, the shell for home. The substance of home is secreted, as it were, upon the framework of the dwelling by the dweller. Home is an expression of the dwellers personality and his unique patterns of life. Conseqently, the essence of home is closer to life itself than an artefact. The architectural dimension of the house and the personal and private dimension of life have become totally fused in our time of exessive specialization and fragmentation only in special cases such as Alvar Aalto´s Villa Mairea. this was a product from an exeptional friendship and interaction between the architect and his client, an ”opus con amore,” as Aalto (1963) himself has confessed. Equally importantly, this residential masterpiece is an expression of a mutuallt shared utopian vision of a better and more human world. Villa Mairea is arcaic and modern, rustic and elegant, regional and universal at the same time It refers simultaneously to the past and the future, it is abundant in its imagery and, consequently, provides ample soil for individual psychic attachment. In The Poetics of Space (1969), which deals with the psyche of space, Gaston Bachelard deliberates on the essence of the oneiric housse, the dream house of the mind. He is undecided about the number of floors of this archetypal house; it has either three or four floors. But the existence of an attic and a cellar are essential, because the attic is the symbolic storage place for plesant memories that the dweller wants to return to, whereas the cellar is the final hiding place for unpleasant memories; both are needed for our mental well-being. It is evident that the caracteristics of the oneiric house are culturally conditioned, but on the other hand, the image seems to reflect universal constants of the human mind. Modern architecture however, has forcefully attempted to avoid or eliminate this oneiric image. Consequently, it is not surprising that modern man´s arrogant rejection of history has been accompanied by the rejection of psychic memory attache to primal images. The obsession with newness, the non-traditional, and the unforeseen, has wiped away the image of the oneiric house from our soul. We build dwellings thet satisfy, perhaps, most of our physical needs, but cannot house our mind.

The essence of home
It is evident that home is not merely an object or a building, but a diffuse and complex condition, which integrates memories and images, desires and fears, the past and the present. A home is also a set of rituals, personal rythms and routines of everyday life. And a home cannot be produced at once; it has its time dimension and continuum, and it is a gradual product of the dwellers adaption to the world. Thus, a home cannot become a marketable product. Current advertisements of furniture shops offering a chance ”to renew one´s home at once” are absurd - they amount to a psychologist´s advertisement to renew the mental contents of the patient´s mind at once. Reflection on the essence of home takes us away from the physical properties of house into the psychic territory of the mind. It engages us with issues of identity and memory, consciousness as well as the unconsious, and biologically motivated behaviorial remnants as well as culturally conditioned reactions and values.

Poetics of home - refuge and terror
The description of home seems to belong more to the realms of poetry, novel, film, and painting than architecture. ”Poets an painters are born phenomenologists,” as J.H van den Berg has remarked (see Bachelard 1969). And so, in my view, are also novelists, photographers, and film directors. That is why the essence of home, its function as a mirror and support of the inhabitant´s psyche, is often more revealingly pictured in these art forms than in architecture. the filmmaker Jan Vrijman (1994) has made the thought provoking remark: ”Why is it that architecture and architects, unlike film and filmmakers, are so little interested in people during the design process? Why are they so theoretical, so distant from life in general?” The artist is not concerned with the principles and intentions of the disipline of architecture and, consequently, he directly approaches the mental significans of images of the house and the home. Thus, artworks dealing with space, light, buildings, and dwelling, can provide valuable lessons to architects on the very essens of architecture itself. Jean.Paul Sartre (1978) has written perceptivley about the autencity of the artist´s house: ”(The painter) makes them (houses), that is, he creates an imagnary house on the canvas and not a sign of a house. And the house, which thus appears, preserves all the ambiguity of real houses.” As well as being a symbol of protection and order, home can, in negative life situations, become a concretization of human misery: loneliness, rejection, exploitation, and violence. In the beginning chapter of Crime and Punshment (Dostojevsky 1866), Raskolnikov visits the home of the old usurer woman, his future victim, and Dostojevsky gives a laconic but haunting descrtiption of the home, whicheventually turns into the scene of a brutal murder. Home turns from the symbol of security to an image of threat and violence. Home is an intra-psychic and multi dimensional experience, which is difficult to describe objectively. Thus an introperspective and phenomenological survey of images, emotions, experiences, and recollections attached to home seem to be a fruitful approach in analyzing this notion that we all constantly use, but rarely stop to analyze.

The home of the memory
The word home makes us immediately and simultaneosly remember all the warmth, protection, and love of our entire childhood. Perhaps our homes of adulthood are onlyan unconscious search for the lost home of childhood. But the memory of home also wakens all the distress and fear that we might have experienced in our childhood. Bachelard (1969, 17) writes: ”A hose constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability,” and, ”it is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos.” And he is speaking about home, a house filled with the essence of personal life. Home is a collection and concretization of personal image of protection and intimacy, which help one recognize and remember who one is. ”I am the space, where I am,” in the words of the French poet Noel Arnaud (see Bachelard 1969, 137) Home is a staging of personal memory. It functions as a two-way mediator - personal space express the personality to the outside world, but equally importantly, it strengthens the dweller´s self-image and concretizes his world order. In their influential book Community and privacy (1963), Christopher Alexander and Sere Chermayeff identified six spatial mechanisms between the polarities of private and public. Thus home is also a complex mediator between intimacy and public life.

The image of home
Before reaching higschool age, my family moved several times due to my father´s job, and consequently, I lived in seven different houses during my childood. In addition, I spent my childhood summers and most of the war years in my farmer grandfather´s house. Regardless of having lived in eight houses, I have only had one experiental home in my childhood; my experiental home seems to have travelled with me and constantly transformed into new physical shapes as we moved. I cannot recall the exact architectural shape or lay-out of any of the eight houses. But I do recall vividly the sense of home, the feeling of returning home from a skiing trip in the darkness of a cold winter evening. The experience of home is never stronger than when seeing the windows of one´s house lit in the dark winter landscape, and sensing the invitation of warmth warming your frozen limbs. ”Light in the window of the home is a waiting light,” as Bachelard (1969, 34) has observed. An authentic home has a soul. I cannot recall the shape of the front door of my grandfather´s house either, but I can still sense the warmth and odour of air flowing against my face as I open the door in my dreams. In an essay entitled The Geometry of Feeling (1985), I dealt with the properties of lived space as compared to common notions of architecture. It seems to me that emotions deriving from built form and space arise from distinct confrontations between man and space. The emotional impact is related to an act, not an object or a visual or figural element. Conseqently, the phenomenology of architecture is founded on verbs rather than nouns: The approach to the house, (not the facade); the act of entering, (not the door); the act of looking out the window, (not the window itself); or the act of gathering around (rather then the hearth or the table as such), seem to trigger our strongest emotions.

Nostalgia of home
I also remember the sadness and secret threat of leaving behind the home as we moved to another town. The most tragic experience was the fear of facing an unknown future and loosing one´s childhood friends. It is clear that the experience of home consists of and integrates an incredible array of mental dimension from that of nationality and beeing a subject in a specific culture to those of unconscious desires and fears. No wonder sociologists have found out that the sorrow for a lost home among slum residents is very similar to the mourning of a lost relative. There is a strange melancholy in an abandoned home or a demolished apartement house which reveals traces and scars of intimate lives to the public gaze o its crumbling walls. It is touching to come across remains of foundations or the hearth of a ruined or burnt house, half buried in the forest grass. The tenderness of the experience results from the fact that we do not imagine the house, but the home, life, and faith of its members. Andrei Tarkovsky´s film Nostalgia is a touching record of the loss and griveance of home (Pallasmaa 1992). It is a film about the nostalgia for an absent home which is typical for the Russian sentiment from the times of Dostojevsky and Gogol, to Tarkovsky himself. Througout the film the central figure, the poet Andrei Gorchakov, keeps fingering the keys to his home in Russia in the pocket of his overcoat as an unconscious reflection of his longing for home. All of Tarkovsky´s films, in fact, seem to deal with the nostalgia of the absent domicile (Volkova 1992). In the Communist state, home changed from a refuge into a place of surveillance, a concentration camp. Yet, home also turned into a mystical dream that countless Russian artists have described in their works.

Home and identity
The interdependency of identity and context is so strong that psychologists speak of a situational personality. The notion is based on observation that the behavior of an individual varies more under different conditions than the behavior of different individuals under the same conditions. The psycho-linguistic studies of the Norwegian born in, Frode Strömnes (1976; 1981, 7-29; 19829 have brought out further dimensions of the interdependency of psyche and context. In his resarch on imagery as the basis of linguistic operations, he has shown that language conditions our conception ond utilization of space. Consequently, our concept of home is founded in language; our first home is in the domicile of our mother thounge. And language is strongly tied to our bodily existence, so that the geometry of our language articulates our being in the world. Home is a projection and basis of identity, not only of an individual but also of the family. But in homes, the mere secrecy of private lives concealed from the public eye also stuctures social life. Homes delineate the realms of intimacy and public life. It is Frustrating to be forced to live in a space which cannot recognize or mark one´s personal territory. An anonymous hotel room is immediately personalized and taken into possession by subtly marking the territory, laying out clothes, books, objects, opening the bed, etc.. The minimum home of a child or a primitive [sic-Ed.] is the mascot or the personal idol which gives a sense of safety and normality. My five-year old daughter cannot go anywhere without her scratching pillow, my American architect assistant travelled to Finland with four books (Joyce´s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot´s Four Quarters and two books on American poetry), while an American architect woman friend travels with her set of kitchen knives, which are her magical instruments to create a sense of home. The Finnish poet Jarkko Laine (1982, 323-324) writes of the things on his window ledge: ”I like looking at these things. I don´t seek aestetic pleasure in them...nor do i recall their origins: that is not important. But even so they all arous memories of real and imagined things.... The things in the window act like a poem. They are images which do not reflect anything.... I sing of the things in the window”.

Intimacy and home
We have private and public personalities; home is the realm of the former. Home is the place were we hide our secrets and express our private selves. Home is our place of resting and dreaming in safety. More precisely, the role of home as delineator or mediator between the realms of public and private, the transparency of the home, as it were, varies greatly. There are ways of life in which home has become a public showcase and the public gaze penetrates the secrecy of home. Generally however, the intimacy of home is almost a taboo in our culture. We have a feeling of guilt and embarrassment if we, for some reason, are obliged to enter someone´s home uninvited when the occupant is not at home. To see an unattended home is the same as seeing its dweller naked or in his/her most intimate situation. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke (1992, 47-48) gives a powerfull description of the marks of intimacy, the lives in a house that had already been demolished but which could still be seen in traces left on the wall of its neighbouring building. These traces of life enabled Brigge to recreate his own past. Rilke describes with staggering force how life penetrates dead matter; here the history of life can be traced in the most minute fragments of the dwelling. In its emotional power Rilke´s description reminds one of Heidegger´s (1977, 163) famous description of the epic message of van Gogh´s Peasant´s Shoes. The later questioning the relevance of Heidegger´s interpretation by Meier Shapiro does not diminish the poetic power of his words, Sharpiro has pointed out that van Gogh actually painted his own shoes, and besides, he made the painting during his short stay in Paris. What is important, however, is the artist´s extraordinarily dense imagery that reflects an authentic form of life. In its intimate polarity, Bachelard (1969, XXIV) points out a bodily experience of the home: ”Indeed, in our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology of the verb inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity.” Home seems to be an extension of bothour bodily and mental existence. The faschination of the world of personal intimacy is so great thatI recall Architectural Design Magazine in the late 1960s having reported on a minute theater in New York where the audience watched through a one-directional mirror-window the daily life of a normal American family living in a flat they had rented unaware of being on stage. The theater was open 24 hours a day and continously sold out until it was closed by the authorities as inhuman. The recent four-volume book entitled A history of private Life (Aries and Duby 1987) traces the evolution of the private realm from pagan Rome to the Great War in nearly 2800 pages and makes the reader understand the cultural relativism of even the most personal and intimate life. Not much can be taken as given in human reality.

Ingredients of home
Home seems to consist of three types of mental or symbolic elements:
1. elements which have their foundation at the deep unconscious, bio-cultural level (entry, hearth)
2. elements that are related with the inhabitant´s personal life and identity (memorablia, inherited objects of the family)
3. social symbols intended to give certain images and messages to outsiders (signs of wealth, education, social identity, etc.)

It should be clear by now, that the structuring of home as a lived institution differs from the principles of architecture. A house as composed by the architect is a system of spatial hierarchies and dynamics, of structure, light, colour, etc., whereas home is structured around a few foci consisting of distinct domestic functions and objects. The following types of elements may function as the foci of behaviour and symbolization: front (front yard, facade, the urban situation), entry, window, hearth, stove, table, cupboard, bath, bookcase, television, furniture, family treasures, and finally memorablia.

The poetry of the wardrobe
The meaning of each element can be phenomenologically analyzed. Bachelard´s analysis of the essential task of drawers, chests, and wardrobes in our mental imagery sets an inspiring example. He gives these objects - rarely considered as having architectural significance - an impressive role in the world of fantasy and daydream. ”In the wardrobe there exists a center of order that protects the entire house against uncurbed disorder” (1969, 79) Wardrobes, cupboards, and drawers represent the functions of putting away and taking out, storing and remembering. The inside of a cupboard is an intimate secret space, and it is not supposed to be opened by just anybody. Little boxes and caskets are hiding places for intimate secrets and as such are of significance for our imagnation. Our imagination fills out compartments of rooms and buildings with memories and turns them into our own personal territories. We have just as great a need to keep secrets as we have to reveal and understand them. One of the reasons why contemporary houses and cities are so alienating is that they do not contain secrets, their structure and contents are concieved at a single glance. Just compare thelabyrinthian secrets of an old medieval town or an old house which can stimulate our imagination, and fill it with expectation and exitement to the transparant emptyness of our new cityscape and blocks of flats. Marcuse´s One-Dimensional Man (1964) considers that buildings of our time are unerotic compared with the erotic imagery conjured up by an enviroment of nature or traditional buildings. One can compare for instance, the fantasies provoked by a meadow outside ancient town walls or by an old attic, to the numbing no-man´s-land of a new housing area or the anonyminity of a contemporary flat cramped between concrete walls and floors. Marcuse believs that the flagrant and violent sexuality of our time is a result of the absence of erotic imagery in today´s built enviroment.

Heart and fire
The significance of hearth or stove for the sense of home is self-evident. The image of fire in the house combines a sense of the most archaic to the most present. The power of the smbolism of the hearth is based on its capacity to fuse archaic images of the life-supporting fire of the primitive [sic-Ed.], experiences of personal comfort, and symbols of togetherness and social status. Maurice Vlaminck (see Bachelars 1969, 91), the Fauve painter, has written: ”The well-being I feel, seated in front of my fire, while bad weather rages out-of-doors, is entirely animal. A rat in its hole, a rabbit in its burrow, cows in the stable, must all feel the same contentment that I feel.” The fireplace is a bourgeois symbol of the separation of fire for pleasure from the fire for preparing food, whereas the image of the stove has peasant-like connotations. Having spent my childhood in a farmer´s home, I can still vividly recall the role of the stove in structuring family life, in marking the rythm of the day and in defining the male and female roles. The power of the image of fire is so vivid that hearths are often built solely as symbols, in the form of mere mantles without any possibility of actual fire. The image of the hearth carries also immediate erotic connotations. No wonder Lewis Mumford discusses the influence of the invention of the oen on sexual behavior in his The Culture of the City. In the modern home the hearth has been flattened to an object with a distant and decorative function. Fire itself has been tamed and turned into a framed picture devoid of its essential quality to give warmth and to sustain life. We can speak of the cold fire in the modern home.

Functions of the table
The structuring function and sybolic role of the table has also largely been lost in contemporary architecture. The significance of the table, however, is powerfully expressed in painting and poetry. Again, I vividly recall the heavy, unpainted wooden table of my farmer grandfather. The rememberance of the table is stronger than of the room itself. Everyone had his or her place at the table, my grandfather sitting at the inner end. The opposite end of the long table, closer to the entry, was left empty and was occupied only when there was an occasional guest. The table was the stage for eating, sewing, playing, doing homework, and socializing with neighbours and strangers, etc.. the table was the organizing centre of the farmer´s house. The table marked the difference between weekday and Sunday, work day and feast. Dilution of the images of home I want to add a remark on the dilution of the image of the bed from being a miniature house, a house within the house, symbolizing privacy, to being a mere neutral horizontal plane, a stage of pricacy, as it were. This makes one recall Bachelard´s (1969, 27) observation that the house, and consequently, our lives have lost their vertical dimension and become more horisontality. Again, innumerous images in historical paintings and drawings reveal the essence of the bed as the intimate core of home. A less self-evident, but powerfully poetic and essential experience of home is the window and, in particular, the act of looking out of the window of the home to the yard or to the garden. Home is particularly strongly felt when you look out from its enclosed privacy. The tendency of contemporary architecture to use glass walls eliminates the window as a framing and rationing device, and weakens the essential tension between the home and the world. The ontology of the door has been lost in the same way.

Lack of concreteness
I live in an attic flat under a tin roof. The strongest and most pleasurable experience of home occurs during a heavy storm. when rain beats the roof, magnifying the feeling of warmth and protection. At the same time, the beating of rain just a foot away from my skin puts me in direct contact with primal elements. But these sensations are lost for the dweller of the standard flat. Cooking by fire is immensely satisfying because one can experience a primal causality between the fire and the hearth. Again, this causality is lost with the electric stove or even more so with the microwave oven. In the contemporary home, the function of the hearth has been taken over by television. Both seem to be foci of social gathering and individual concentration, but the difference in quality is however, decisive. The fire ties us back to our unconscious memory, to the archaeology of images. Fire is a primal image, and it reminds us of the primary causality of the physical world. At the same time that flames stimulate mediative dreaming, they reinforce our sense of reality. The television alienates us from a sense of causality and transports us into a dream world which weakens our sense of reality, of ourself and the ethical essence of togetherness. Instead of promoting togetherness, television forces isolation and privatization. The most shocking experience of the negative impact of the television was the Gulf War, which was telecast in real time around the globe as dramatized entertainment. An analysis of television as a structuring device of the contemporary home is, of course, essential for the theme of this Symposium, but I do not have time to elaborate on it. Altogether, the weakening of the sense of causality threatens modern life. The menance represented by our brave new world lies in ist lack of concreteness. Even fear is acceptable as long as it has its understandable cause or it symolizes something, and as long as it is not cloaked in apparent order and wellbeing. The irrational fear in our cities grows out of the meaninglessness of the enviroment to our reason, and its incomprehensibility to our senses. We are loosing the primary casuality in our sensory experience of the world. The psychologist Edward Edinger (1973) writes that ”Symptoms (of an illnes) are, in fact, degraded symbols, degraded by the reductive fallacy of the ego. Symptoms are intolerable precisely because they are meaningless. Almost any difficulty can be borne if we can discern its meaning. It is meaninglessness which is the greatest threath to humanity.” This meaninglessness, a hypnotizing emptiness and absense of locality and focus, the existential vacuum, has become a recurring motif of contemporary art. It is alarming indeed, that the favourite theme of art today is the total isolation of man, disrobed of all signs of individual identity and human dignity.

The architecture of tolerance
If architecture and home are conflicting notions, as it seems, what then is the architect´s possibility of faciliating homecoming, that Aldo van Eyck has so emphatically demanded? In my view, architecture can either tolerate and encourage personalization or stifle it. We can make a distinction between an architecture of accomodation and an architecture of rejection. The first one facilitates reconciliation, the second attempts to impose by its arrogant and unchangable order. The first is based on images that are deeply rooted in our common memory, that is, in the phenomenoloically authentic ground of architecture. The second manipulates images, striking and fashionable, perhaps, but which do not incorporate the personal identity, memories, and dreams of the inhabitant. It is likely that the latter attitude creates architecturally more imposing houses, but the first provides the condition of homecoming. Furthermore, there is a significant difference in the nature and quality with which different architectural designs can allow and absorb aesthetic deviation without resulting in undesirable conflict. The architecture and furniture designs of Alvar Aalto are an encouraging example of design which has a great aesthetic tolerance, yet it is artistically uncompromising. The virtue of idealization My acknogledgement of a conflict between architecture and the intrinsic requirements of home, could perhaps be interpreted as advocacy of the view that the architects should faithfully the explicit requirements and desires of the client. I want to say very firmly that I do not belive in such a populist view. Uncritical acceptance of the client´s brief only leads to sentimental kitsch; the architect´s responsibility is to penetrate the surface of most often commercially, socially, and momentarily conditioned desire. The authentic artist and architect consciouly or knowingly engage in an ideal world. Art and exhilarating architecture are lost at the point that this vision and aspiration for an ideal is lost. The South-African writer J.M- Coetzee (Coetzee 1987) has said that taking the reader into consideration when writing is a deadly error for the writer. Umberto Eco (1985) has distinguished between two types of writers; the first type writes what he expects the reader to want to read, the second creates his ideal reader as he writes. In Eco´s view, the first writer will write mere kiosk literature, whereas the second writer is capable of writing literature that timelessly touches the human soul. In my view, only the architect, who creates his ideal client as he designs, can create houses and homes that give mankind hope and direction instead of mere superficial satisfaction. Without Frank Lloyd Wright´s Fallingwater, Gerrit Rietveld´s Schröder House, Le Corbusier´s Villa Savoye, Pierre Chareau´s Glass House and Alvar Aalto´s Villa Mairea our understanding of modernity, and of ourselves, would be considerably weaker than now because these masterpieces concretizes the possibilities of human habitat.

Feasibility of a homecoming
Authentic architecture is always about life; man´s existential experience is the prime subject of the art of building. To a certain degree great architecture is also about architecture itself, about the rules and boundaries of the dicipline itself. But today´s architecture seems to have abandoned life entierly and changed into a pure architectural fabrication. Authentic architecture represents and reflects a way of life, an image of life. It is thought provoking that today´s buildings frequently appear instead empty; they do not seem to represent any real and authentic way of life. Today´s architectural avantgarde has deliberately rejected the notion of home. Peter Eisenman (1987) stated that ”Architecture must dislocate... without destroing its own being, while a house today must still shelter, it does not need to symbolize or romanticize its sheltering function, to the contrary. Such symbols are today meaningless and merely nostalgia.” Beyond the rejection of issues of domicile, today´s avant-garde architecture has all but abandoned the problems of mass-housing, which was a core issue of the modern project. Our post-historical era has ended historical narratives and the notion of progress, and closed our view of the future. This loss of horizon and sense of purpose, and shortening of perspective, has turned architecture away from images of reality and life into an autistic and self referential engagement with its own structures. At the same time, architecture has distanced itself from other sense realms and become a purely visual artform. I may believe in groundless nostalgia, but I also belive in the feasibility of an architecture of reconcilation, an architecture that can mediate man´s homecoming. The art of architecture canstill produce houses that enable us to live with dignity. And, we still need houses that reinforce our sense of human reality and the essential hierarchies of life. A friend of mine, the Finnish poet Bo Carpelan, has written a number of powerfull poems that deal with the poetics of the house and the home. His poems, I feel, condence the essence of home and give a lesson to us architects:

There are still houses with low roofs,
window bays where children climb
and crouch, chins pressed to their knees,
watching the damp snow falling peacefully
into the dark, crowded yard.
There are still rooms that tell of life,
cupboards full of clean linen, passed down.
There are quiet kitchens where someone sits
and reads, book propped against the loaf.
Light has the sound of white curtains.
Shut your eyes, and see
that you await the morn, even impatiently,
that its warmth mixes with the warmth herein
and that each falling snowflake
is a sign of homecoming

- Bo Carpelan, 1989

Text from: The Home: Words, Interpretations, Meanings and Environments
Avebury, England
ISBN 1 85628 888 9